It doesn't appear that the objective merits of the tools under discussion yield a single best answer. For example, if you look through various implementations of assorted somewhat-esoteric algorithms & formulae, I have found that the FORTRAN implementations are usually cleanest. Not because the language is cleaner or anything like that, but because the most experienced people in the field didn't see the point of bowing to language fashion.
If fashion were the deciding point I suppose we'd all be compelled to use JavaScript, so, yeah. I'd rather not reimplement something that already works right, least of all when it's a fiddle problem and I've got deadlines to hit.
You make a great point. The only thing that I'd add is that a lot of the Fortran code that I'd rely on (large venerable linear algebra and ODE packages) were written a long time ago, when it would have been somewhat less unfashionable.